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ICarly (2007–2012 web video series)
What if Earth suffered a mass devastation? This is the question explored by the YouTube original web video series iCarly. Casual episode production ran from 2007 to its eventual cancellation in 2012, as the teen creators moved on to new ventures, fading into history thanks to an alienated fanbase starved of the channel's flagship content. The series was lauded for the combination of its irreverent humor and its careful handling of real-world issues such as the unfolding apocalypse. The series saw international syndication on Disney Channel for two years after its cancellation, at which point the contract expired. Characters iCarly starred a diverse cast of white American kids just trying to make it in a classical apocalyptic high school setting, complete with all the stress, romance, and other clichés commonly associated with attending an apocalyptic high school. Meet Carly Shay, a precocious teenage war general who video-logs the horrors of her everyday life; Sam Puckett, the hilariously shell-shocked best friend who is constantly slipping into her own personal twilight zone while rambling incoherently about butter socks and squids that are simultaneously kids; and Freddie Benson, a turquoise platypus that happened to wander into the wrong recording studio one fateful day. They are overseen by their mentor figure and overall straight man with a pyrotechnic streak, Spencer Shay, who calls the show out on its bizarre conventions and potentially damaging mid-to-late-2000s humor through merciless dismantling of the fourth wall. A strange old man named Gibby also began to make unscripted yet recurring non-speaking appearances on the web show after the crew temporarily leased its rights to his voice actor. Despite this, the cast was known for its unprecedentedly realistic characterization and its lack of need for focus group–tested gimmicks such as ongoing shipping subplots. Premise What if Earth suffered a mass devastation? Production The show originally used a mix of live action and animation styles as popularized by celebrity chef Logan Grove. This aspect was dropped early on as the harried animators soon learned about the motion tween feature in Adobe Flash. As the YouTube revenue increasingly failed to put bread on the metaphorical table, iCarly became a puppet show in late 2012, with only a single cheaply constructed background used: a wasteland with various cars in a pile-up, an empty raided gas station, and several makeshift graves. The first episode produced in this new style would sadly become the show's finale, as offended fans expressed their discomfort with the Windows pointer that somehow ended up on the printout used as said background. The cast and then-one-person camera crew shamefully disbanded over a combination of creative differences and strange, foot-related allegations. Post-production The actors reunited along with the hosts of another contemporaneously popular web show for Sam & Cat, an hour-long spinoff special that lasted from 2013 to 2014 on account of being posted late on New Years' Eve. The special was filmed in a military base in Italy. In the episode, the actors briefly broke character to suggest that there was a much deeper philosophical meaning to all parts of the original web show series, leading to a collective online scramble to uncover the truth, alongside an ARG that turned out to be an elaborate fluke constructed by an insane fan purportedly suffering from clinical psychosis, a claim that was in turn revealed to itself be a completely unrelated but oddly coincidental elaborate fluke by yet another fan who has yet to receive an official diagnosis on a similar front. Trivia *''What if Earth didn't suffer a mass devastation?'' Category:2007 Category:2012 Category:Series